A Life Lived: Her story had plenty of drama, Hollywood-style
Myrtle Goldfinger was caught in a confused cultural dichotomy: She was born in Tokyo but moved to Southern California with her Japanese parents when she was just a year old. She looked Japanese, but her attitude was pure American. She was gorgeous by many counts, but not her own, because having grown up in Hollywood in the 1930s, her idea of beauty was all-white, all-American. Even in old age, Mrs. Goldfinger wouldn't leave the house without first putting on eye makeup to make her eyes look wider, said her daughter-in-law, Danna Kostroun. "People don't want to see Asians," she'd say in declining an invitation to attend, for example, a grandchild's music recital. Mrs. Goldfinger married twice, and both of her husbands were white Americans. Her son, Marian University political scientist Johnny Goldfinger, recalled that when he married Kostroun, a white woman from Ithaca , N.Y. , "it was the happiest day of (his mother's) life." But desp